Question: How long did it take you to introduce a military aircraft into the Ministry of Defence?

Pete Symons answered on 9 Mar 2015:

I’m going to have to answer this in two parts as there is my contribution to introducing the aircraft then the actual project life-cycle which started before I was involved.

The A400M ATLAS which you see in some of my pictures, is actually about 12 years in the making, right from the conception of design and then through the design an manufacture process with Airbus Military. There have been some lengthy delays in the programme for all sorts of reasons ( it originally supposed to be delivered in 2009), some (most) of which are not engineering related but political. The A400M ATLAS was built as a military variant of an Airbus product but the its mostly a brand new design so it will most likely be a long time from concept to actually flying the aircraft. I suspect that most future aircraft procurement from the MOD will be buying existing civil platforms and ‘making them military’.

My involvement in delivering the aircraft has been developing the safety argument identify what the risks are with operating the aircraft and providing assurance to the MOD Senior Mangers that they are safe to fly the aircraft. I have spend the last year developing the argument . So peanuts compared to the overall programme.

Just out of interest, I am also helping to introduce the next flying training aircraft for the MOD and the overall programme is expected to take about 4 Years (fingers crossed no delays!) to introduce 3 aircraft types.